The Quantification of Decision Support Benefits Within the Context of Value Analysis

Abstract

Traditional cost-benefit approaches to evaluating the effectiveness of decision support systems are generally regarded as inadequate. More recent approaches account for the intangible benefits overlooked by traditional costbenefit analysis, but still attempt to express benefits in terms of costs. This paper focuses on a value analysis. It advocates a methodology for (1) identifying significant intangible benefits for a specific decision support system, (2) quantifying these benefits in value terms, and (3) establishing a decision rule for identifying the significance of the proposed system. Finally, an alternative approach at deriving the benefit utilities is examined.